There are two premises behind imposing damages in civil suits:
1) Restitution for the injured parties. Hard to measure in a case like this, but you can essentially think of this as the digital equivalent of conversion (i.e. using someone else's property for personal profit without permission). So the fair restitution might be whatever dollar figure the person would have been willing to have been paid to have that information data mined.
2) Deterrence of harmful behavior. The proper measure for this should be (dollar amount of profit from choosing the harmful course of action) / (probability of getting caught). I.e. if you do something harmful and profit $10 million, and have a 10% chance of getting caught, then assessing restitution and punitive damages of $100 million makes taking the harmful course of action economically irrational.
An arbitrary cap, or a cap based on the price of the product, is not relevant to either measure.
1) Restitution for the injured parties. Hard to measure in a case like this, but you can essentially think of this as the digital equivalent of conversion (i.e. using someone else's property for personal profit without permission). So the fair restitution might be whatever dollar figure the person would have been willing to have been paid to have that information data mined.
2) Deterrence of harmful behavior. The proper measure for this should be (dollar amount of profit from choosing the harmful course of action) / (probability of getting caught). I.e. if you do something harmful and profit $10 million, and have a 10% chance of getting caught, then assessing restitution and punitive damages of $100 million makes taking the harmful course of action economically irrational.
An arbitrary cap, or a cap based on the price of the product, is not relevant to either measure.